The NATO Summit opens in Washington this morning with Britian and France demanding that the United States face the obvious: ground troops must be considered a serious possibility. This is more than President Clinton expected or wanted and all the more reason that a demand Wednesday by Sen. Olympia Snowe be answered by the White House.

Sen. Snowe wants the president to comply with a law she authored and passed last August with Sen. Max Cleland, a Democrat of Georgia. That law simply states that when the president requests funding for a military mission that involves or is likely to involve 500 or more troops, he must clearly define the objective of the mission and provide either an end date or a set of criteria that, once achieved, would conclude the mission. The law, Sen. Snowe said, does not allow “the Kosovo operation to escalate in the dark.”

Sen. Cleland, who lost both legs and his right arm in a grenade explosion in Vietnam, said he pushed for the legislation to prevent another Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. That resolution, supported overwhelmingly by Congress in 1964, gave President Johnson the authority to vastly increase U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The Snowe-Cleland law lis one way to prevent this country from repeating mistakes of the past.

The senators have been clear from the beginning that they are willing to work with the administration to find a practical way to present the information required under the law. They have recognized that war is not a tidy business, that surprises are the rule. But what they are asking for is something the administration should have voluntarily presented more than a month ago.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev recently warned that, “The danger is becoming real that the Yugoslav tragedy could engulf the entire Balkan region and even all of Europe. Even if the conflict is stopped soon, it is clear that the world could hardly go back to what it was before March 23.” There is hyperbole in such a prediction, but the fear of a spreading war is real and understandable. Defined goals offer assurance to opponents of NATO’s actions — Russia, China, India — half the world’s population — that there will be no creep in the mission.

These goals, properly presented, will not limit the president’s authority or remove strategic options. They will, instead, clarify strategy and build resolve.